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So!

This is going to be a loooong post, but I'm hoping that if we're nice to each other (it's still Christmas until Twelfth Night!) and focus on the specific ideas here rather than the broad, generalized question of female SM, we should be alright! I THINK my ideas here are specific and uncommon enough to have a proper thread aboutt them! I hope, anyway.

Additional caveat: You are absolutely welcome to your own head canon, conversion, interpretations, etc. Even if it WILDLY contradicts my opinions. As long as you (and, ideally, your opponents) are having fun, you are Winning Warhammer.

I hope, anyway.

First of all, let me say up front, that despite being a woman who plays 40k, I am 100% cool with the Astartes being all-male. I used to resent it, for several reasons (including the obvious, simplistic "I want a big giant post-human superhero with power armour and a chainsaw sword that I can see myself in" one), but over time, I thought more and more about the spirit of 40k, and what it's meant to say, and what games and genres and movies and comics and such it's in response to, the point they were trying to make, what makes it different from other sci-fi/fantasy/horror franchises, what makes it different from other tabletop games, and that, if you're trying to make a point about other media, yeah, you have to reflect the way that media is gendered, and what genders it is or isn't directed at.

Space Marines are, in very large part, an exaggeration, satire, and deconstruction (all at once) of the kinds of violent, militaristic, sexless-yet-hyper-masculine power-fantasies sold to boys in the 80s (the time 40k was created) and propagated in the specific political context of Cold War Britain, with Thatcher at Downing Street...

It was furthermore made by people whose parents lived through WW2, and who had other family or acquaintances who'd lived through WW1 as well... and whose childhoods had included things like, say: the bombed out ruins of a cathedral (sound familiar?)…

Jingoistic, violent, us-vs-them, Warhawk attitudes in the USSR and USA were very literally threatening everyone with the total, apocalyptic destruction of the human race. Even the optimistic outlooks in the UK (see: V For Vendetta) were of an outcome in which the UK managed to disarm and thereby stay out of the initial nuclear exchange while most everyone else got killed (and that later turned out to be naive as hell.... nuclear winter, fallout, ecosystem collapse, wind, etc).

And in that context they were seeing people selling things like Action Man, G.I. Joes, Rambo 2, Transformers, Contra, and.. well... Dungeons & Dragons: "Genocidally exterminate all the orcs in the nearby ruined keep and you'll save the village, earn a bunch of XP, and earn a bunch of money to buy more weapons and armour! Which will make you better at exterminating the next group of indisputably, Always-Chaotic-Evil baddies!". And, virtually exclusively, selling them to boys. Exactly the gender that had been fed into the meatgrinder of WW1 and WW2, that's effects were still visible.

A friend of mine once wrote (though he had a huge of a character say it, in an awful context) that the one time/place in human history it would have been better to be born a girl than a boy was "Europe, in the latter half of the 1890s".

(that's just to illustrate a point, not something I want to argue about)

Space Marines are the reply to all that "Hell yeah! Cool bad dudes killing stuff with huge sweet guns is AWESOME!" stuff... the manner in which GW both replied to the hugely disturbing implications of selling war as a fun cool thing to boys when war was both threatening the literal extinction of the human race and had, only a generation prior, claimed the lives of MILLIONS of boys. BUT (and this is crucial), they offered this reply while... still giving you the bad dudes killing stuff with huge sweet guns.

If they'd just made a game about solving conflicts with diplomacy and empathy, so as to show boys and young men that violence isn't the answblahblah, it would have been boring as eff, and a commercial failure, and eye-rollingly patronizing, and they knew that. They were ALSO trying to incentivize sales of their miniatures! So they took the opposite approach: they amped up the Cool Dudes and Huge Guns and Killing and Genocide, but then ALSO showed you an EQUALLY exaggerated version of everything horrible, violent, terrifying, fascist, hopeless, self-defeating, perpetual, futile, etc etc etc that goes with it! And, in some cases, are inherent! You think big armoured ultra-violent fascistic space marines with giant guns are awesome, Little Timmy? Well, I don't blame you, I do too! But the thing is, no happy future would EVER include such a thing, their very presence implies a horrific situation, they themselves are a horror, and their nature suggests they're part of the problem. Sorry, Timmy. :-(

When we bear all that context in mind, and look at the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, the Angels of Death, etc, what do we see? An exaggerated, horrific version of a stereotypical pre-pubescent male power fantasy, and, MUCH more importantly, an exaggerated, horrific version of the only fantasy adults were really offering to, or permitting for, boys and AMAB children, despite all the immense tolls warfare had taken on humanity that century:

- I run away from home, my parents never tell me what to do ever again
- I don't have to go to school anymore, I just learn cool stuff like how to use a sword
- Only boys. No more girls, no more cooties.
- I don't have to grow up. Instead I just become SUPER strong and awesome, and can beat up EVERYONE who ever teased me.
- I don't have to get a job, I just spend the rest of my life playing Warhammer with my mates!
- Etc

But, unlike the usual, you actually intertwine the fantasy with all the horrors that war, violence, militarism, separation from family and normal human life, fascism, etc actually entail. Cartoonishly magnified t heavy metal standards to match the cartoonish extremes of power fantasy. And thus is made the critique.

Would female space marines be empowering? Sure they would! But 40k isn't meant to be empowering. It's meant to be horrific. And space marines (unlike other factions, like the Imperial Guard, Knights, AdMech, etc) are meant to be horrifying in a very gender-specific way. And some things you shouldn't want inclusion in... "first female school shooter to exceed 50 fatalities" would not be a triumph for gender equality, after all. "There should be more female representation in the KKK!" or "Why can't there be more female serial killers?" would be horrible things to want.

40k addresses, satirizes, and deconstructs a great many things, but what Space Marines are addressing is specifically about boys and AMAB kids and how we raise them, and what the consequences of that can be.

And besides, if you introduce women to space marines, not only have you compromised the specific point being made by generalizing it, you've also introduced sex, and sexuality, and thereby adulthood and all its attendant anxieties into the fantasy of Space Marines, meaning it is no longer a boy's fantasy (or deconstruction thereof), and becomes something wildly different.

Just like why Batman can never marry Selina or Talia.

SOOOO... with THAT all said, the thing that actually DOES bug me about how GW treats female space marines?

The incredibly silly explanation.

Women get organ transplants from male donors ALL THE DANG TIME. Sexual dimorphism in humans is as minimal as evolution could possibly make it (like: why make two separate things when you can just use hormones to slightly tweak the same thing to two different roles", that kind of idea... just, ignore me personifying evolution as an entity, and definitely one with actual intentionality )…

Obviously the REAL WORLD explanation is the above, plus lots of other stuff about marketing, miniatures sculpting, proportions, modularity, customer demographics, etc etc etc

But for IN-universe explanations, I want something not so mind-numbingly dumb as "women go all mutant and stuff if you put in geneseed, cos the geneseed comes from male Primarchs". At least TRY, guys!!!

DAMMIT, I just accidentally hit submit... hang on a sec...

So, the explanation I've always thought would make a HECK of a lot more sense would be if it were simply tied to hormonal development and sexual reproduction. That's it.

Like...

1) Emperor wants the Astartes to be sexless, so they are more focused and one-dimensional as warriors. He also wants them to be unable to reproduce, so that he can control their numbers, and make sure they ultimately don't overpower and replace humanity. And he decides it is easier to.... so as to be discrete... easier to accomplish this for male candidates than for female candidates.

2) Although a pseudo-Astartes can be made from an adult, the full potential requires "repurposing" adolescent hormonal growth, including secondary sex characteristics. If he wanted to have it work for girls and boys alike, while still preserving some level of secondary sex characteristics (and preventing traumatic dysphoria in the neophytes), he would have needed to create two different versions of all the organs and treatments that are related to sex hormones. He was on a tight schedule, these were meant to be a 'small' elite force rather than a huge mass of conscripts, he was already thinking about problem number one, so he chose, on a practical basis, to stick to men. Trying to make a girl into Astartes you'd end up with a beefy, muscular, bearded lady with narrow hips and almost no breasts and she'd probably be absolutely miserable.

3) First two explanations are already sufficient, but what would make it really fun / funny is implying Emps was kinda sexist, too. So, yes, making a method for both sexes would've been more time and work, and perhaps reduced the efficiency of creating new Marines, but maybe he could have still managed it. Or maybe he had to pick one binary sex and chose male Just Because.

Put all that together and, IMO, you have a version that preserves the classic canon, maintains the spirit of the original game, has a bit of humour, and is VAAAAAASTLY more believable than "Women can't accept XY organ transplants" or whatever.


P.S. None of this is to say that 40k doesn't have room for improvement, or should stay forever the same. Like I love how they've slowly made the Sororitas less sexualized over time, and more "Death Nun here to kill you, sinner". There's still the boob-plate, but stuff like that is the price of admission on a goofy, metal setting like 40k. While, by the same token, I like how they're keeping the factions for which "sexy ladies" make sense (Daughters of Khaine, for instance) within that vein. It's all about context, and what works best for each idea! ... That said, the one place where I think they have really, BADLY dropped the ball is Imperial Guard. There should be WAY more than one woman in that range.

P.P.S. Sorry for the HUGE number of edits, I just went through and edited a bunch of typos. Because I am hopelessly neurotic.

Your point (2) is probably closest. Remember the Astartes were made by bolting stuff engineered from leftovers from the primarch project into 'normal' humans, and the primarchs were all male (in so far as they had gender). If you've read Scars, Malcador had an opinion on that.....

Malcador smiled. 'You brothers - such a nest of rivalries. I warned him to make you sisters, that it would make things more civilised. He thought I was joking. I wasn't.'

I'll just go slightly off topic while I wrap my head around your points. (However, to also jump right in. I have often said I wanted the Astartes to be totally without sex or gender - why waste any bodily resources on first and secondary sex characteristics at all in your post-human super soldiers who you specifically designed to never breed... and for that matter, why limit your new super soldiers to only recruit from 50% of the population. Also, to get a bit spiffy... when we are talking post-evolution, post-human bioengineering, you would probably yield better results if you could just get rid of sex-specific traits and pluck and pick the hardiest and best part of all available material within the genomes at hand (I'm a psychologist btw. not a biologist, so bear with me). However, your point about it lessening the parody is a great one. And for that matter, Big E was neither omnipotent nor infallible, so maybe we can get away with him just not being able to achieve everything to the most effective measure - oh, and please play nice folks, these are just my opinions :-) )

Now, back on the slighty off topic part.

We know very little of the biopolitics and policies of reproductions of the Imperium (as far as I remember). We see some in how they view mutations and in the purging of the unclean, the xenos etc., but overall we know very little. One would expect to see tons of overt biopolitics on display in a sledgehammer regime as that of 40k. Stuff like propaganda in regards to breeding, the celebration of people with good genes, elevation of parents who birthed non-mutated babies and so forth. I expect the answer is that the Imperium is simply too big, very easily replenishes their losses, and that these phenomenons would be more visible on some planets than others. Those fielding large armies, or planets within systems close to areas with mutative capabilities for example, but if we have examples they slip my mind.

These things would be nice to know more about in regards to how the Imperium and its soldiers view their gender.

*Btw. While I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis of the origins of the game, I feel like we must also remember that the creators of 40k. (as with Moore etc.) were also just geeks who wanted to geek. They were just clever geeks who wanted to feel clever about it.

When you're mass producing literally millions of super soldiers, you have to consider averages. If making the Astartes all male means that the implantation process results in 1% less rejections, you make them all male. If making the Astartes all male means that Astartes are on average 1% stronger, you make them all male. And lets not forget the thing that a lot of people tend to ignore and brush under the rug because it's an uncomfortable topic: Men are from a biological standpoint disposable. If you have a population of 1000 men and 1000 women, the population will recover far more quickly if 950 men are taken to be aspirants/conscripted/die than if 950 women were.

Imagine, if you will, building a suspension bridge. You can make that bridge out of either steel or copper beryllium. Steel is cheap and plentiful, you can literally make it by accident when melting iron. It's strong and remarkably resilient in the short to medium term considering how brutal oxygen is to 99% of other elements. Copper beryllium takes specialised equipment and knowledge and is a massive pain to make and work with. Which do you build the bridge out of?

Also, ya know, the 40k universe is not a nice place. Even if there weren't legitimate both in universe and out of universe reasons for Astartes to be male only.

My head cannon for this has always been two fold.

1) there's the compatibility process. The process of the Astartes is a male only process due to resource saving because the empire is everyone is expandable don't waste resources kind of place.

2)it's a very stoic and religion/conservative/traditional place. Men become Astartes because that's how it is. Women become Sororitas because that's how it is. To try and alter these views would be heresy.

It's fits with the whole, do you accept the emperor as your savior? no?...... okay wait here *goes back to space hulk* bombard them.

Eh, my headcanon has always been very simple:

Loyalist space marines are male because loyalist space marines have always been male.

You don't need a more complex rationale than that. The emperor might have been a little sexist, or maybe he just made all the primarchs male for the heck of it. Maybe he was gay and liked looking at good sculpted dude bods - makes sense given his choice of bodyguard anyway.

And that's it. It's the imperium. There's plenty of other things they've been doing exactly the same for a measley 10k years, why not space marines?

And then you have chaos space marines. IMO, female chaos space marines are completely acceptable in canon. There are literal magic gods involved. There are chaos space marines with ding-dang tentacles and antlers and arms growing into laser guns, I'm pretty certain they're purposefully rejected every rule the imperium ever put into place, specifically and on purpose. Once you break away from the Imperium, anyone the gods like the most can become a chaos marine.

Identity fantasy wargaming? No...

I think it's ironic that the OP nderline, very correctly, that GW produced Space Marines and 40K as whole as some sort of critique and satire of the warmongering entertainment sold quasi exclusively to boys in the 80's. Today, 40K and Space Marines are no longuer satires. They are taken "seriously" both by the players and GW itself. They are sold as action-drama not dark comedy anymore. Space Marines became what they despised. I guess GW stared into the abyss for too long.

I personnaly was in favor of female Space Marines even though there are reason not to have any. I simply thouht that the advantages of female Space Marines were greater than the preservation of the "all male rule". Now that GW seems to be ready to support the Sisters of Battle line of models and their fluff, they are sort of superfluous.

PS: As mentionned by someone above, female Chaos Space Marines should still be a thing in my opinion if only because people like Fabious Bile like to fiddle with the creation process and magic is involved.

epronovost wrote:
I think it's ironic that the OP nderline, very correctly, that GW produced Space Marines and 40K as whole as some sort of critique and satire of the warmongering entertainment sold quasi exclusively to boys in the 80's. Today, 40K and Space Marines are no longuer satires. They are taken "seriously" both by the players and GW itself. They are sold as action-drama not dark comedy anymore. Space Marines became what they despised. I guess GW stared into the abyss for too long.

This was the exact thing I was thinking when I was reading Natalie's very thoughtful analysis of the Space Marine origins. I wish GW would still remember all this. But mostly they don't.

 Crimson wrote:
This was the exact thing I was thinking when I was reading Natalie's very thoughtful analysis of the Space Marine origins. I wish GW would still remember all this. But mostly they don't.

Satire is only an elaborate joke with heavy cultural references. Like any joke it cannot last long and cannot be deepened without losing its joke status. You can't explain a joke without making it lose its "funny factor". If GW 40K product was to last it could only become serious. Many distopian universe started out as satire and jokes, but became serious with time. A joke told enough times becomes a meme; a meme told enough time becomes a trope; a trope used enough time becomes an archetype; an archetype represented enough time becomes a political statement about reality. With time, a satirical universe becomes a distopian one and with even more time and repetition can become a wishful universe. We can already see the distopian elements of 40K being diluted into a more "noble" fantasy. 40K ages just like any other story of its type it seems.

My head-canon for my Space Squids chapter is that in desperation they tried girl children and it worked, and since the finished product is basically the same they've continued using whatever flesh is available to keep up their intake.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
...Trying to make a girl into Astartes you'd end up with a beefy, muscular, bearded lady with narrow hips and almost no breasts...

This is the bit that always puzzled me. Take a teenager of either gender and then give them new hormonal glands to grossly inflate bone and muscle growth, add in an extra stomach, graft a bunch of extra bits onto the brain, completely replace the lungs and ears with artificial better versions, implant subdermal plating to plug the power armour into, chemically castrate them, and shave them, and would you really be able to tell whether they started as a man or a woman?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
...Trying to make a girl into Astartes you'd end up with a beefy, muscular, bearded lady with narrow hips and almost no breasts...

This is the bit that always puzzled me. Take a teenager of either gender and then give them new hormonal glands to grossly inflate bone and muscle growth, add in an extra stomach, graft a bunch of extra bits onto the brain, completely replace the lungs and ears with artificial better versions, implant subdermal plating to plug the power armour into, chemically castrate them, and shave them, and would you really be able to tell whether they started as a man or a woman?

That's the thing that always surprise me. Take a teenager, shoot him up with all sorts of drugs and hormone, replace some organs, add some new one and in the end, you end up with a large man. Space Marines look pretty much just like slightly oversized muscular men. Some of them are handsome, some meh and some are ugly. It all depends on the artist who represent them. They look pretty much just like any other human male in the Imperium. Space Marine look like humans. They are impossible to mistake for humans and human men for that matter.

Considering all of this, I don't see why potential Space Marine women world look any different than any other soldier-like women except slightly oversized. Space Marines don't look like mutated human freaks closer to the Ogryn than to the normal human form even though there are good arguments that they should. I find this idea that a woman who does a man's job must take upon the traits of a man (and the better she is the more like a man she must look and act) a little bit sexist and unrealistic. Tall and strong women don't look like men anymore than small and weak men look like women. Each of them "look like their own thing".

 AnomanderRake wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
...Trying to make a girl into Astartes you'd end up with a beefy, muscular, bearded lady with narrow hips and almost no breasts...

This is the bit that always puzzled me. Take a teenager of either gender and then give them new hormonal glands to grossly inflate bone and muscle growth, add in an extra stomach, graft a bunch of extra bits onto the brain, completely replace the lungs and ears with artificial better versions, implant subdermal plating to plug the power armour into, chemically castrate them, and shave them, and would you really be able to tell whether they started as a man or a woman?

All of those statements work equally in favor of female candidates for renegade space marine chapters.

Every oppression and denial of a person’s desires is an opportunity for Chaos to grow and spread. The ideal candidates for the process are genetic outliers, and if the Imperium only selects men, that leaves the exceptional female candidates to turn to Chaos when the whispers or fate lead to it. For that matter, even if the chemical castration was a necessary component of the process, once you’ve turned to Chaos there’s undoubtedly things that can be done to compensate for it.

For that matter, as silly as “boob plate” powered armor would be, if someone thought it would infuriate the loyalists enough, it’d get done.

There’s enough accounts in real life of oppressed minority groups taking opportunities in piracy that if it’s at all possible (and with enough renegade action it has to be possible), there should be women in the Chaos Space Marine forces, whether they’re wearing boob plates or sensible armor.

Disclaimer: The Imperium is the cause of most of the Imperium’s problems.

Edit: And remember, in the Imperium the response to something like the Protestant reformation would be screams of “Heresy!” Ordaining, I mean inducting, women as Space Marines ain’t going to go over well.

I just take it to be a product of a bad understanding of science.

You wanted girls marines to identify as them ?
Because you think I identify to a genetically engineered immortal space killer monk from the future ? Just because he may have a penis too ?
Well, I did read the full post though and it's sad that so much subtility has been lost and the horrific side of the space marines is often totally forgotten, indeed. I could totally see teenage actually loving them when they weren't supposed to be, as you wrote...
And how can you be against so called boobs plate but at the same time criticize the lack of women in the Guard ? You can't even tell if they are men or women under the fatigue. The only way would be to over exaggerate some sexual characteristics like... boobs plate.

 godardc wrote:
And how can you be against so called boobs plate but at the same time criticize the lack of women in the Guard ? You can't even tell if they are men or women under the fatigue. The only way would be to over exaggerate some sexual characteristics like... boobs plate.

Right now, guardsmen look barely human, but with a modern line with some good design, you can totally make women look like women without exaggerated sexual characteristics. Severina Raine doesn't have a boob plate or really any overly feminine clothing, but looks like a miniature women. You can even make gendered equipment that isn't sexualised like a different helmet pattern for example or an extra sash to help drive a difference if you want. It's not necessary, but it can help. The Clone Wars series has different helmet for their male and female Mandalorians for example so you can make the difference between one and another even when they are background characters.

PS: Yes, I do think you "identify" with a futuristic super soldier in a sense that there is a certain attraction of you toward them based on their appearence (which certainly includes gender btw), symbolic and values. They must fullfil at least a little bit a fantasy or trope you reallly like.

epronovost wrote:
I think it's ironic that the OP nderline, very correctly, that GW produced Space Marines and 40K as whole as some sort of critique and satire of the warmongering entertainment sold quasi exclusively to boys in the 80's. Today, 40K and Space Marines are no longuer satires. They are taken "seriously" both by the players and GW itself. They are sold as action-drama not dark comedy anymore. Space Marines became what they despised. I guess GW stared into the abyss for too long.

I personnaly was in favor of female Space Marines even though there are reason not to have any. I simply thouht that the advantages of female Space Marines were greater than the preservation of the "all male rule". Now that GW seems to be ready to support the Sisters of Battle line of models and their fluff, they are sort of superfluous.

PS: As mentionned by someone above, female Chaos Space Marines should still be a thing in my opinion if only because people like Fabious Bile like to fiddle with the creation process and magic is involved.

No, back in the 1970s only men served in infantry roles in most armies that the geeks founding gw would've seen or experienced. That's why, at least, the main reason. The fact that it was aimed at boys played a part but there are plenty of female miniatures from the 70s and 80s so....

 AnomanderRake wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
...Trying to make a girl into Astartes you'd end up with a beefy, muscular, bearded lady with narrow hips and almost no breasts...

This is the bit that always puzzled me. Take a teenager of either gender and then give them new hormonal glands to grossly inflate bone and muscle growth, add in an extra stomach, graft a bunch of extra bits onto the brain, completely replace the lungs and ears with artificial better versions, implant subdermal plating to plug the power armour into, chemically castrate them, and shave them, and would you really be able to tell whether they started as a man or a woman?

Again, as I explained, if being only male means even a 1% better success rate, you take only males. We're talking at least at the origins of the legions needing to mass produce millions of Astartes extremely rapidly, both for the Crusade and to help the Emperor cement his power after all the Thunder Warriors totally died in honourable battle honest don't look into it just trust me. If using females results in less successes, you don't use females. We're also talking about post unification Terra which is still a hellhole by any reasonable definition and I assume in a mere twenty eight thousand years human biology has not changed to the extent of making males less disposable. You're totally right that "female" Astartes would be literally indistinguishable from male Astartes, so why people are so adamant about it I'll never understand.

And the out of universe reason is, just because. Their universe, their decisions. I don't go and tell Joss Whedon he has to let Slayers be male because it "offends" me, nor do I tell tell Philip Pullman he has to allow males to be Witches, or tell Brandon Sanderson he now has to change Robert Jordan's universe to allow men to use saidar.

Didn't Jervis Johnson, the guy who made designed space marines, explictly state that the marine creation process only works on males because its keyed to work with male DNA? Or something like that?

I guess I get where he was coming from. Logistically speaking, if it takes 100 units of whatever resource to make a man into a marine, but 200 units of whatever to make a woman into a marine, then of course you are only going to take men and design the process to work on men as that's the most efficient route.
Remember that men produce more testosterone, which builds more muscle mass. You want your super soldiers to be tough and strong enough to campaign against xenos and the like, so it might just have been easier and cheaper turning men into marines.

Also, male expendobility typically explains why men have traditionally taken up front line military roles.

But Space Marines are so far detached from the humans from which they are made that the biological differences between men and women are basically nil in comparison to the biological differences between human and marine.

For that reason, I've always regarded attempts to justify the purely male marines with "science" as severely lacking. It makes more sense to me that the emperor was an arrogant, egotistical dick who wanted the marines made in his image (male) and the Imperium isn't about to change it now as to do so is to go against tradition. They assume that the emperor made them male for some good reason and nobody questions it. In the Imperium, things are done how they were done before.

I just wish the geneseed was called astartestosterone. Ba-dum... ok I'll go get my coat.

For what it's worth, I accept your premise, but I will add to point 3 - as well as being a sexist, the emperor was a bit of an ass as well. I also think at least part of a 'better' canon was since the emperor was male, and the space marines were created from his genetic code, they had to be male too. *crickets*

For what it's worth though, I have no gripes with the trope of female super soldiers (and fwiw, do enjoy a kick-ass and empowering female protagonist, ever since I was a kid and had a crush on Buffy) and if gw had written it as such back in the day, I'd be perfectly happy to accept itvnow,

BaconCatBug wrote:When you're mass producing literally millions of super soldiers, you have to consider averages. If making the Astartes all male means that the implantation process results in 1% less rejections, you make them all male. If making the Astartes all male means that Astartes are on average 1% stronger, you make them all male. And lets not forget the thing that a lot of people tend to ignore and brush under the rug because it's an uncomfortable topic: Men are from a biological standpoint disposable. If you have a population of 1000 men and 1000 women, the population will recover far more quickly if 950 men are taken to be aspirants/conscripted/die than if 950 women were.

Also, ya know, the 40k universe is not a nice place. Even if there weren't legitimate both in universe and out of universe reasons for Astartes to be male only.

queen_annes_revenge wrote:Also, male expendobility typically explains why men have traditionally taken up front line military roles.

Both are valid points, but they mostly answer what the Imperium probably would do, not what it could or can do. Also, it makes for a lot better arguments in regards to the rank and file marines, the grunts if you will. But there are instances where it would make a lot of sense to try and widen your recruitment base. When it comes to recruitment of librarians or grey knights for example, where the recruitment pool is exceedingly rare to begin with, it makes less sense. It think it is stated that something like only 1 in a thousand possible applicants for grey knight conversion makes the cut. Applicants who are already a sparse and very valuable resource.

It's pretty clear that Geneseed fills in everything. Just look at the specimens blood angels start with. If they can be turned into super humans and the imperium is ok with wasting time and resources on them rather than recruiting from a population of muscle men, then they can do it to women as well.

As for it only working on 'male' DNA, there's no such thing. The sry gene only exists on the y chromosome, but it's not the sole origin of male phenotypes.

Women naturally produce testosterone.

If Geneseed/organs aren't rejected by male immune systems, they won't be rejected by female immune systems. That's the only thing that sticking foreign tissue into your body needs to worry about.

There's no physiological reason that women's bodies would not work with the organs.

You have to spend more time trying to scientifically exclude women from being compatible, which makes it look pretty deliberate.

It's far easier to fall back on cultural intolerance

..you've really spent time ruminating on this one.

for me, its just emps focused on one thing and went with it, maybe because the geneseed is still more important to make sure it isn't wasted than any life tied to it, so if it works more often on men than women for whatever reason, why make both. the shortage would be in the geneseed either way, even then, human life to burn in the name of the greater mission was all over in comparison. forcing it on males is the natural choice between the two for reasons already stated in the thread.

He also at least so far as I know doesn't explain much because he himself is to be fair, on an entirely different timetable than most people and even his own creations. I kinda liken him to a Lich, in that he's beyond old enough for lifetimes to pass in a blink of his eyes anyhow. He was busy looking at a long haul picture to the point he didn't see the crap roiling in the distance that did get him.

he could very easily have done it simply off the first part of your explanation at the end, though i don't know why it's fun to imply him being a sexist as well. if these are to be humanities defenders, then to minimize any potentials of later genestock mutation combined with not wanting them to separate out and rule, it adds up to keep the soldiers controlled one way or another, and this is a solid enough way to just say the process is like this, even if it actually isn't. kind of like how last I checked the jury's out on how the Thunder Warriors died off.

it also managed to sync up with the concept, whether in or out of game of knightly orders, which out of game made a perfect slot for the Sisters of battle to arrive.

Personally i don't care for almost any space marine, and quickly anything in power armor. it never appealed to me to be such a thing., but then i hardly connect to most things people claim is "for me" anyway- i find it unnecessary. I found the potential religious stuff i dug out of interesting a time ago, but not anymore.

I really don'think there is much point in arguing scientific realism of this in one way or another. 40K doesn't simply work like that, most things do not make much sense from the real science perspective. So any reasons for having or not having female marines are not borne out of that. If GW wants to have female marines they will just write that Cawl figured out a way to make it work, and then it works. And if they don't want that, then they just keep saying that the made up nonsense science doesn't allow it. But none of this has anything to do with real science, 40K 'science' simply works how GW says it does.

 Byte wrote:
Identity fantasy wargaming? No...

Did you… actually read my post? I'm very explicitly NOT saying "Space Marines should be gender inclusive!!!". I'm literally saying the opposite.


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Bdrone wrote:
..you've really spent time ruminating on this one.

I ruminate on lots of things!

It's more that I was a) really drunk last night, so not self-editing as much as I ought, and b) absolutely TERRIFIED of being accused of "identity politics" or "radical feminism" or whatever, so wanted to make my views as clear as possible.

Though I apparently got the accusation regardless.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Crimson wrote:
I really don'think there is much point in arguing scientific realism of this in one way or another. 40K doesn't simply work like that, most things do not make much sense from the real science perspective. So any reasons for having or not having female marines are not borne out of that. If GW wants to have female marines they will just write that Cawl figured out a way to make it work, and then it works. And if they don't want that, then they just keep saying that the made up nonsense science doesn't allow it. But none of this has anything to do with real science, 40K 'science' simply works how GW says it does.

I totally agree that 40k is not hard sci-fi, and shouldn't be hard sci-fi. This is, after all, the franchise in which the answer to "how do they achieve FTL interstellar travel?" is "Uhhh… Magic? Magic that punches a hole through Hell?".

That said, there's Soft Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Space Opera explanations that "feel" right and maintain the suspension of disbelief, and there's some that feel like such a massive cop-out that I roll my eyes, lose my sense of immersion, and start thinking about the writer's lack of imagination rather than the thing they're supposedly explaining. And "Girls can't become Astartes because the Primarchs were male, so the geneseed would be rejected" is absolutely one of these. Especially because so many cooler explanations, with more interesting explanations, are readily available!

nataliereed1984 wrote:

Bdrone wrote:
..you've really spent time ruminating on this one.

I ruminate on lots of things!

It's more that I was a) really drunk last night, so not self-editing as much as I ought, and b) absolutely TERRIFIED of being accused of "identity politics" or "radical feminism" or whatever, so wanted to make my views as clear as possible.

Though I apparently got the accusation regardless.

As do I, though ill admit I don't make things like this much of my focus at all. credit to you for having dug so deep and trying to be so clear, id say you did that to me at least. also, musta been one heck of a drinking time!

that said.. seems like we're just kinda putting opinions out there. apparently any scientific connection is the only thing being refuted out of being considered silly (and can't say I agree with that), which just has me wondering where this goes from here.

(edit): ooh, extra stuff. so, i think why im not really bothered by the lack of the extra information is that some things in all this are left vague on purpose, or are falsities outright. something to come to ones own take on, and whether or not they will actually explain it or not is up in the air. to me, i don't really wish to look for a direct explanation if somethings been in the air to long, because the payoff rarely ever makes up for it.

Bdrone wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

Bdrone wrote:
..you've really spent time ruminating on this one.

I ruminate on lots of things!

It's more that I was a) really drunk last night, so not self-editing as much as I ought, and b) absolutely TERRIFIED of being accused of "identity politics" or "radical feminism" or whatever, so wanted to make my views as clear as possible.

Though I apparently got the accusation regardless.

As do I, though ill admit I don't make things like this much of my focus at all. credit to you for having dug so deep and trying to be so clear, id say you did that to me at least. also, musta been one heck of a drinking time!

that said.. seems like we're just kinda putting opinions out there. apparently any scientific connection is the only thing being refuted out of being considered silly (and can't say I agree with that), which just has me wondering where this goes from here.

Oh, I was definitely having fun with the drink! It was the remaining half of the spiced rum I'd used for the Christmas eggnog. It left a TON of embarrassing typos I just painstakingly went through, though.

Rather than a debate of real-world opinions, I was more hoping for a thread of interesting alternative head canons for the in-universe explanation. Does that make sense? I just spent way too much of my original post on the real-world opinion stuff rather than the in-universe stuff I had meant to talk about!